Proper benchmarking and resource measurement is an important topic, because benchmarking is a widely-used method for the comparative evaluation of tools and algorithms in many research areas. It is essential for researchers, tool developers, and users, as well as for competitions. We formulate a set of requirements that are indispensable for reproducible benchmarking and reliable resource measu...

INTRODUCTION Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) and Total Quality Management (TQM) are gaining acceptance in many of today’s health care delivery systems. Hospitals have incorporated this philosophy both as a means of enhancing quality of patient care through continuous improvement and to improve efficiency and effectiveness of management, but also to satisfy the Joint Commission on Accredita...

The variety of threats and vulnerabilities within the online business environment are dynamic and thus constantly changing in how they impinge upon online functionality, compromise organizational or customer information, contravene security implementations and thereby undermine online customer confidence. To nullify such threats, online security management must become proactive, by reviewing an...

Benchmarking is an important phase in developing any new software technique because it helps to validate the underlying theory in the specific problem domain. But benchmarking of new software strategies is a very complex problem, because it is difficult (if not impossible) to test, validate and verify the results of the various schemes in completely different settings. This is even more true in...

Grid benchmarking is an important and challenging topic of Grid computing research. In this paper, we present an overview of the key challenges that need to be addressed for the integration of benchmarking practices, techniques, and tools in emerging Grid computing infrastructures. We discuss the problems of performance representation, measurement, and interpretation in the context of Grid benc...

BACKGROUND Although benchmarking may improve hospital processes, research on this subject is limited. The aim of this study was to provide an overview of publications on benchmarking in specialty hospitals and a description of study characteristics. METHODS We searched PubMed and EMBASE for articles published in English in the last 10 years. Eligible articles described a project stating bench...

The 2006 Commercial End Use Survey (CEUS) database developed by the California Energy Commission is a far richer source of energy enduse data for non-residential buildings than has previously been available, and opens the possibility of creating new and more powerful energy benchmarking processes and tools. In this article—Part 2 of a two-part series—we describe the methodology and selected res...